Sunday morning, while my sister and I were preparing for our mother’s 80th birthday party, I thought that I could easily collect several dozen recipes and ideas – including a veggie pinwheel we invented that morning – for party trays and make a Party Tray cookbook.

You see, my mother once ran a hotel’s Banquet and Catering department, my sister is known for her Game Day parties and works as a baker, my daughter-in-law did some catering before her health deteriorated and I don’t blink at the prospect of feeding 15 people on 2 hours’ notice, have a housekeeping column in a local newspaper, and work in a deli. I can do food for entertaining without having to think twice.

Of course all the information about querying agents, etc. that I’ve been accumulating for The Wyndham Papers is useless for a cookbook.

Awesome idea! We need more party food cookbooks. Titles: Party Palette? Or Party Palate?

I did a family cookbook (called Stewed Monkey Heads and other family favorites), filled with family anecdotes and recipes stretching back 8 generations. The hardest part was translating the oldest recipes and formatting everyone’s unique style of recipe writing into one cohesive format.

I’m considering a follow-up, but this one will just be the foods I fed my children as they grew up. Formatting will be easier. I’m calling it Shrunken Head Pies and more family favorites.

I’ve been pondering the idea for some time now. I’d like to gather my moms recipes, many of which span 3 generations, and place them in a book. I need to do it soon with her failing eye sight. It would be a good gift for the family.

My children all adore having the family cookbook - as do my siblings and cousins, nephews and nieces, and their kids. Be sure to include family history anecdotes. They don’t have to be about the recipe, but if they are, that’s extra good.

I used a recipe website to put a lot of family recipes online for my kids. It’s great to have all the standards handy and available rather than scribbled on cards and scraps of paper or, worse, just inside my head.

Your mom would probably love to see a book of her recipes and to know that they won’t be lost.

I used a recipe website to put a lot of family recipes online for my kids. It’s great to have all the standards handy and available rather than scribbled on cards and scraps of paper or, worse, just inside my head.

I’ve written some legacy recipes on my homepage. Together with some of my own ideas. My daughter was suspected to be allergic to egg as a child. I had to test how to make pancakes and such without. My searches for “pancakes without egg” brought only recipes that were also gluten-free, milk-free and taste-free… Seems to be typical: there are recipes trying to be for “all diets”, very obviously developed by people who do not need to eat them themselves, and so the poor one (usually child) having the diet has to eat something that tastes like cardboard while others are having delicacies…

Things have gotten much better for people with allergies in the past decade or so. There’s a way to use ground flax seeds as a substitute for eggs, there’s all different kinds of flours that have various uses that aren’t wheat, and obviously there’s substitutions for milk (though not all of them are equal). My mom has had to learn to improvise. She has celiac.